Session: Bringing Your Mobile Title To The Epic Games Store - Walter Somol, Epic Games

Next up we have Walter And I'm I'm delighted to have Walter up here cuz um when I was doing uh uh Steam games, he was fantastic to help me out uh when on the Steam store. Uh he's now going to talk to us about um bringing your mobile title to Epic Games Store. And uh Walter, over to you, sir.
Well, if you all just uh listen to Chip's excellent talk, I think this timing is going to be good. Um so I'm Walter. I run the partnerships team for the Epic Game Store. Uh, and a lot of what I'm going to talk about dovetales into what Chip was saying without being

repetitive. So, uh, let's jump right in. I think you all know who Epic Games is. Uh, and thanks to Chip's wonderful introduction, a lot of the things that we're trying to do in the world right now. Um, what I want to talk a little bit about today is some of the performance um, at least up through the end of calendar year 2024 because we haven't updated to 2025 yet. um and talk about some of our growth and particularly product plans for the future and I give you all a heads up on how to to get started on EGS uh today. So um I think as you know we are now a multiplatform store. I call it one store for platforms uh PC, Mac, iOS and Android. Android of course globally iOS in the EU um and soon to come to and Brazil and soon to come to Japan and the UK. uh based on some of the regulations that have been passed. Um we have a global reach. I we're available in 190 countries. Um 34 languages. We just updated that last year by adding 16. Uh

and over 64 local payments. Um unfortunately we don't yet support cash on delivery, which is my favorite. Um I've been pitched that multiple times over the the past year and that's always fun. I really want to actually see that one in action. um even though it is legit and I've heard how it actually works. Uh the industry forecasts PC and mobile to continue to grow console to um basically contract due to the um shift in the console life cycle. So no surprise there. Um like I said, I'm going to blow through these numbers quick because basically this is 2024. We do our annual year and review blog that will come out in the coming weeks. um hopefully in time for dice when I need to talk about about it with people there. Um but these numbers have generally gone up. Directionally, this is SCA the scale of the store. So that's helpful. Over 70 million monthly activives. Uh we probably have hit 300 million accounts in our ecosystem. Um

and while these are PC numbers, they are super relevant for mobile and I'm going to get to that a little bit later. Um, we hit a billion dollars in total PC ecosystem spend last year in 2024, meaning uh, and that includes firstparty and third party. Um, and as we like to say, we're 50% of Steam's monthly activives with 5% of the catalog. Um, we like to have the good stuff on our store. Uh, as we look to a few other metrics um, from last year, I think one of the important ones, at least for me, particularly talking with thirdparty game developers and publishers, over twothirds of our players are active in thirdparty content. I still get the question, are you a Fortnite store? And and we're not. Uh, I mean, we do have Fortnite on the store. It's our one of our anchor tenants. Every great platform needs those anchor tenants, that great first-party content. We're using that to pull in an audience and to share it with all of, you know, folks like you guys out there. Um, over 50% of our players are only active in thirdparty content.

Um, and that's a pretty great stat. And of course on mobile that's growing. Um, Epic Rewards I'm going to come back to and and yes, our catalog is growing. So, some of the other key highlights for us, uh, I talked about global reach. Um, this thing is super fuzzy, so I'm having trouble reading it. Either that or my eyesight. um regional storefronts. So, we have um a single storefront around the world and um that's really not great from a discoverability standpoint, right? You've got content that's going to appeal to different people. They could be in China, in Europe, um etc. So, we're going to be updating that this year, hopefully by the end of the first half. Everything you hear me talk about today on the product side starts first on PC, comes to mobile later. So, this is all going to be relevant in the long run. Um, webshops. Again, if you just listen to Chips Talk, uh, he did a great job outlining the the legal landscape and the opportunities with web shops. We launched what we call five of our web

shops, which means it's there and available. It's probably good for folks that don't have the most sophisticated monetization practices because it's basically you can bunch put a bunch of content on the store on a web page basically on our store and sell it. But if you're doing things like dynamic pricing, dynamic bundling where you're offering different content to different players, uh, which is a great monetization tactic, we don't support that yet. Um, hopefully that'll be later this year. As I said, we added languages last year to get up to par and I think it's either parody with Apple, Google, or one more because we like to be first. Um, and then we're continuing to support additional payment methods. So, um, this slide is sort of restating the obvious challenging times in the industry. I don't know if there's ever been a time where it hasn't been challenging, but in this particular time, everything has gotten more expensive, right? Development costs are through the roof. Marketing and discovery costs, you know, discovery is

about as hard a problem now. I mean, you still have to make a great game. That's always been hard. Um, discovery is harder than ever. And what we're trying to do is evolve and expand the industry uh in positive ways. mainly around things like our revenue share and opening up um a wider audience. Um so if you didn't hear last year we updated our rev share. It's always been the standard 8812. You don't have to do any special deals. You don't have to know Walter or somebody on my team. That's what we do for everybody. We updated it to now you keep 100% per title per year of the first million dollars of revenue that you generate on the store. PC or mobile um including web shops and stuff like that. So we already had basically roughly industryleading um certainly compared to any of the incumbent platforms uh revshare and now we just made it even better. This obviously will be particularly useful for smaller games, indie studios and stuff like that that may ultimately pay us nothing uh over the years and that's

cool. We're okay with that. We launched Epic Rewards um two years ago now, two and a half years ago now. Pretty standard if you've used Nintendo coins or you've seen that program. 5% goes back into your Epic Wallet, you can then use that to fund future per purchases. Uh works across PC, mobile, web shops, everything. Any transaction that goes through our transaction systems, if you're using your own, obviously we can't track them. What we did last year was really, really interesting. We experimented with increasing that rewards boost to 20%. And we started that in the mega sale and that mega sale we do every year roughly May June time frame. Um the original plan what we it's 20% for firstparty content. We didn't put an end date on that yet. For third-party content we put an end date of August 31st and we just said hey let's see what happens. We saw a dramatic increase in sales in the store. It's been a fantastic Last year is going to be one of our best years ever on the store. Like I said, we'll give you those numbers in a few weeks

when they've all been approved and gone through everything. Um, we're going to be very careful when we report those numbers to remind folks that we had the 20% rewards boost because in some respects we've we've bought into that increase in revenue. So, let's be fair, but we've basically had some of our best months year-over-year uh ever on the store and you're going to see real growth. This is important. any platform that's trying to grow and sort of push into that break uh breakout area like we are um hugely valuable. We just ended it on Gen 8. There is a whole bunch of rewards sitting in people's wallets now waiting to spend. Um a lot of the way they spend is on free-to-play content. Um and they're going to continue to be able to get 20% from buying V-Bucks and then spending it on third party games and stuff like that. So, still exciting. will probably continue to maybe pulse that during a mega sale, holiday sale. Um, so we can continue to reap the benefits and our uh our partners can launch everywhere. This is a partnership

we're doing with the Unreal Engine team. Um, basically sim ship your game on EGS, PC, mobile, get a reduction in Unreal Engine royalties, uh, etc. Really cool program. We're seeing a lot of people doing that. We do have Unreal Engine folks here at the show as well if you want to talk to any of them. We have a meeting space right behind the reception in the lobby. Feel free to stop by uh say hi uh and we can give you guys an update on all that stuff. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about a product. I'm going to try and speedrun through some of this. I don't know if there'll be much time for questions. Um so storefront and launcher par really really important as we grow the store. And by parody, we mean parody with other e-commerce platforms, right? There's a lot that we still need to build. We invested a lot last year. We updated a lot of features. That's been great. We've got a lot more to do, a lot more to come. And what's really important as we get to the second u point on the slide is the mobile development and converging all of those features and

stuff so that it really feels like one store uh on four platforms. Um, and that's going to be a lot of the work that we do this year and next next year. To recap 2025, we updated the download manager. It was super jank before. Now it works like you want. You can pause. You can shift things around. Great. Consumers love it. Um, we added the languages. Like I said, we updated the build patch tool, added a graphic user interface, which is great for people like me that aren't technical. You can actually now have marketing folks and other folks upload your build to the store and you don't have to run a command line. It's great. You're going to love it. Um, we have preloading now. Uh, and gifting we launched just in time for the holiday. That was huge. We saw a lot of throughput there in addition to the rewards boost. We finally added gifting on the store. Great. Mobile, we're bringing library search and browse. Um, social, I'm going to I'm going to go dive into the slide uh on that one. And then just a bunch of other

shop stuff, the gift cards, uh, web shops, etc. Let me skip through a couple of these slides. The improved download manager, like I said already, we already talked about the store localization, really capturing, I think around 93% of the world these days. Webshops.5, my friends at uh, Codename launched this with us for idle champions. We have a handful other stores. One of the things I wanted to add to what I talked about before is UGS is a web shop destination. Um, there are a lot plenty of other folks out there providing web shops. That's great. You want to go use uh one of them, Fastring, Codep, Exola, uh, you're all getting pitched by them anyway. Um, we have no issue with that at all. You can steer out of the Epic Games Store version of your app. No problem. There's no hidden fees. No hidden fees to Apple or Google or us or anything like that. that would really be counter to everything that we've been trying to do, right? um for EGS as an opportunity on web shops. We obvious we

already have an existing e-commerce platform over 70 million monthly activives. Like I said, people are comfortable transacting with us. Um they might feel better about doing that than going to your website. That's okay. Or maybe you do both. Uh we've seen people talk about that. The other thing is as we grow our library of web shops, it might be a nice easy way for gamers to come in, find their web shops, transact across a few of them, add a few things to their cart, and then check out once uh for things like that. So, there's a few advantages. I'm not here to tell you use ours over everyone else's. Use what makes sense for your business. Educate yourself from the folks that are here. Um, in many respects, we're kind of on the same team is how I look at it. Um, so please please do explore that and like Chip said in the last talk, we're in this window of no steering fees. We'd all love there to be no steering, but that steering is a subset of the transactions, right? You yes, lower friction to have a button right in your

game, click out to that web shop, but it's not the only way to get people there. So don't don't be uh disheartened if stuff comes in uh later because Apple and Google are not playing nice with the rest of us. I'm going to fly through these because I touched on them briefly. Um, and more more importantly is uh the mobile updates that are coming. Uh, we've got improvements to search. I believe this went live already uh towards the end of last year as opposed to the browse updates. We're just trying to make discoverability better in increments over time. If you're paying attention to how Epic does our product releases, I think you're going to find that we like to take a very, very MVP approach. first thing goes out there. It's functional. You can transact and buy games. That's great. Can't do a lot of other things right now. We don't have a lot of featuring capabilities and stuff like that, but we're getting there. Um, so you'll see all of this stuff grow over time. And social is a big one. This is a really, really big part of why we think mobile players are

going to actually ultimately use EGS over um, some of the incumbent platforms, more so your midcore, hardcore players. now. Um, less so if you've got a super super hyper casual. Um, I have folks ask me all the time like, "Hey, I've got my hyper casual game, you know, should I bring it to EGS?" And I tell them, "Well, think about it for a minute. If your audience is, let's say, 70-year-old grandmothers, do you think they're going to go download any alternative app store to get your game?" And this applies to everyone in the room. If you think the answer to that is no, then wait. you know, you don't have to rush and and jump in the uh ocean with us yet, but we'll get there. We'll bring that audience um over time for sure. Social is going to allow us to reach across platforms. We've actually launched um text chat recently um and uh that's actually been going pretty well. We're getting adoption and this is where, you know, you don't have that functionality on Google and Apple um and even some of

the other platforms that have their companion apps. It's not quite as functional. Ours true text chat, voice is coming, parties are coming later. Everything that you can do in Fortnite right now from a social perspective, we're adding to the platform level. You won't have to do anything. Um, there will be some future features for EOS if you want to get uh a little deeper in that. So, this is really really important for us for a strategy and we think this is what's going to make EGS really sticky for uh players. We added a a QR code and an authenticator. So there's there's a second Epic Games app now on um on mobile platforms particularly for regions where we are blocked still uh on iOS. And this is allow us to expand that social footprint for now until we can converge everything together. Um I think you all know that you can't uh you can't put stores on iOS, the App Store, and the Google Play Store. that's one of their big blockers.

So, we have to kind of keep things separate um for now. And then a few things coming in the future um really really important to have improve discoverability, merchandising and things like that, not only on PC, but it's coming to mobile as well. Um there's a huge rewrite of the backend. We call it rearchitecting the store. This is both at the launcher level and the store level. Why are we doing this? Um, you know, every everybody's in this room knows that you typically code things to a point where they're done and they don't blow up and then at some point you have to refactor things along the way. And we're at a point of major refactoring um to basically make these improved merch merchandising services and discoverability better uh in the future. So there's a lot of backend work going on in behind the scenes. That's going to take a year. Um, but we're going to be able to roll out a bunch of this stuff along the way. Gifting will come to mobile. Um, and we're really excited about bringing clip sharing uh

and capturing and stuff like that. As we get further down the road, obviously using uh a mobile version of the store as a PC companion app and vice versa starts to become really interesting for players. I can transact. I can buy my favorite PC game and I can manage my library from my mobile device when I'm on the go. You can do vice versa. I mean, there's a vision in the long term, but I think we're really going to see that mobile to PC is where most people will use that. Um, improve performance, uh, wish list communications of course, and then, as I said, social. So, I'm going to stop there because we're just about at time. Um, if you want to bring your game to mobile, we are still curating the store. We don't have the mobile self-publishing tools ready yet. That should come online hopefully by this summer, which means we'll allow everybody to be able to come in and do it themselves. but we can help shortcut you there. If we're not meeting already, come by the Epic Games uh meeting room and we can help get you started. Give you a shortcut to get there. You want to

take a question or what do you or not? Like it's up to you guys.
I think more a comment I'm going to make actually. um you know when when we were working with you on Steam and there was some lack of self-service tools at the time you were you and your team were fantastic and very responsive much more than any other team I've ever worked with in terms of store pages. So I think if you guys are interested in doing mobile I think now is a fantastic chance because you'll get the chance to get to work with that team directly and they're really really on the money. So uh I mean I can't I can't speak more highly of you guys.
Thank you. Yeah, I mean we do it's part of our strategic strategic advantage to have human beings to talk to. For sure.
Yeah. And and reason I say that by the way is because so those you don't know I was one of the earliest people to do mobile uh stores uh back in 2003 around the three store uh in the UK. We were the largest revenue per user in the world and so I've been there done that and and to see a team like that I don't say these things lightly. So they're

also thank you so much.
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